It’s been more than a year since I last shared anything work-related online. January 2024 — a LinkedIn post about leaving Animalz and starting out on my freelance journey. What I didn’t share was that I was 4 months pregnant. I didn’t want potential clients to be put off working with me, so I kept that quiet.
I was very busy from January to May 2024. I was lucky to have a couple of great, long-term clients. I had previous relationships with both of them and so I was open about what was going on and my availability. I also had a few one-off projects — one of which wanted to kick off a longer engagement. I declined, but at the time I didn’t share my personal reasons, which I regret.
Thankfully my pregnancy was smooth and I was able to work as planned up to the end of May, giving me a couple of weeks off before my mid-June due date.
Then. Holy shit. I had a baby.
Of course that brought a ton of sleepless nights, the blur of feeds and naps and “is he meant to be doing that?”
But while all my new mum friends settled into their year-long maternity leave, I felt like I needed to get back to work as soon as possible. My clients were great and were happy to give me some time away, but I didn’t want to wait too long and risk losing them.
So by September I was back at work — albeit doing tiny amounts. I took on single writing assignments from each long-term client, and worked on them an hour at a time, during naps or between feeds.
Since then I’ve been gradually ramping up and taking on more work, all leading up to the start of this month when my little boy started nursery. Now I’ve got dedicated work days, I can work in chunks longer than an hour, and best of all, I can plan ahead! I’m lucky that I’ve been booked up for all of April and May for my first couple of months “fully back”.
This has been a crazy season but this feels like the start of a new chapter. If I haven’t spoken to you for a while, this is why. I’ve got a lot more to say about these last 9 months (parental leave! A crazy round-the-world trip!) but I’ll come back to that later.
-E